Leisure sailing has never been more affordable and comfortable, as designers have refined composite construction techniques to craft sailboats with ever more spacious and luxurious cabins. But as cabin headroom has grown, so too has freeboard, the height of the main deck over the waterline. Higher freeboard is problematic in only one significant way; it can be much harder to climb aboard.
From floating dock to main deck, many larger sailboats now require a climb of over 30 inches, the functional equivalent of stepping onto a moving dining room table. While this is presumably effortless for the captain and experienced crew, with a pitching deck and a water gap, this climb may be a daunting task for younger, older, or less athletic passengers.
Surprisingly, to the present day, the vast majority of recreational sailors rely on stairs or ladders placed on the dock next to their boat. Again, while effective for the crew, many less experienced users find that these devices present the distinct disadvantage of requiring the user to climb to height before taking the most dangerous step, the step onto the rocking boat.
In addition, dock stairs are not truly portable, and cannot readily be carried when visiting another port. As such, many recreational sailors use dock stairs at their home berth, yet carry a folding ladder for use in other ports. This redundancy is less than ideal, as most folding ladders are bulky and require significant storage space, and all are difficult or impossible to use while docking or casting off with mooring lines in hand.
Dock access ladders mounted onto sailboats would seem to be the ideal solution, but in fact, none has achieved any significant measure of market success. Most designs attach a removable ladder to a permanent mounting, screwed or bolted directly into the fiberglass deck or hull. While such mounting is certainly possible, most knowledgeable boat owners do not take drilling lightly, as water infiltration into the fiberglass laminated balsa wood core can cause extremely expensive structural damage.
Hook type ladders, requiring no permanent mounting (hereinafter “hook-on” ladders), are popular for use in small leisure motorboats, which have substantial gunwales and sit close to the water. But unlike most motorboats, modern sailboats have very short gunwales and high freeboard, making hook-on ladders for sailboats virtually non-existent in art.
Most modern sailboat gunwales, having lost the need to actually mount guns, are more commonly known as “toe-rails,” and are reduced in size to a mere inch or two, to serve the function of preventing sailors' feet from slipping overboard. Modern toe-rails are commonly made of extruded aluminum or wood, or may be integrally molded into the deck with fiberglass composites.
These small modern toe-rails have heretofore been considered unsuitable for mounting dock access boarding ladders. As discussed in prior art below, a sailboat's fore and aft rocking motion tends to cause a ladder's hooks to “walk” over the short toe-rail, casting the user into the water. Obviously, next to a dock, this condition can be fatal.
In brief, the present invention is a secure, toe-rail mounted, dock access boarding ladder for sailboats. The invention is designed to eliminate the dangerous condition of a ladder “walking” overboard, by introducing a channel the width of the invention, serving as a single, continuous hook, locked in place onto a toe-rail. These improvements allow for a compact, removable, boarding ladder for sailboats, without the need for invasive permanent mounting.